The pavements reflect windows, streetlamps and people walking quickly, pretending to have somewhere definite to be. It is almost eleven. Across the road, a man is waiting outside a blue door.
He checks his phone. Puts it back in his pocket. A few seconds later, he checks it again.
Perhaps someone has written to say they are on their way.
Perhaps no one has written at all.
At a certain age, you learn that both possibilities can produce exactly the same expression.
I watch him from my window, holding a cup of tea that has long since gone cold. It is not curiosity. Or not only curiosity. I am interested in people when they believe no one is watching. That is when they finally stop performing.
My phone lights up on the table.
Are you still awake?
The message is from a man I have not heard from in almost three months. One of those men who disappear without an argument, without saying goodbye and, most inconveniently, without dying. You cannot even romanticise them properly.
I read the question again.
He does not ask how I am. He does not say he has missed me. He only wants to know whether I am still awake.
I am.
But I do not reply.
Being available and allowing yourself to be found available are not quite the same thing. It is a distinction I learned late in life, along with the importance of a decent face cream and the complete futility of arguing with a man whose emotional vocabulary consists mainly of emojis.
I look outside again.
The man beside the blue door has lit a cigarette. He shields it from the rain with one hand. He is over fifty, perhaps only just. His coat is too light for the weather, and he still carries that particular posture of someone who hopes to be desired without appearing to be waiting.
I know that posture.
We have all worn it.
We wear it when we check whether someone has read our message. When we say a relationship “was never anything serious,” even though we spent weeks imagining where his toothbrush might go. When we persuade ourselves that solitude is a choice because the alternative would be admitting that, on certain evenings, it is not.
My phone lights up again.
I was thinking about you.
There it is.
The sentence that opens every door we had closed with great dignity and very poor carpentry.
I could answer.
I could pretend to be detached. I could write something brief, elegant and faintly cruel. I have enough experience to know which words to use and enough vanity to want them to have an effect.
Instead, I place the phone face down on the table.
Not because I have suddenly become wise.
I am still romantic, against all available evidence.
But tonight I would rather watch the man across the road.
The blue door finally opens. Another man appears. They do not embrace immediately. For a moment, they remain perfectly still, separated by a few inches and everything they have not yet said.
Then one of them smiles.
It is a small, cautious smile.
The other lowers his eyes.
The door closes behind them.
I remain at the window for another few minutes. The street is empty again, but a light comes on upstairs.
Perhaps they will fall in love.
Perhaps they will spend only the night together.
Perhaps tomorrow one of them will say he is not ready for anything serious, as though love were a flat still under construction.
I cannot know.
And that is precisely what interests me.
What happens between desire and fear. Between a message written and one deleted. Between a body growing older and the stubborn, almost comic need to be chosen again.
I write about people waiting outside doors.
And those who remain behind windows.
About men who disappear and later ask whether we are still awake.
I write about loneliness, but not as an illness. About desire, without pretending it is always romantic. About age, sex, missed opportunities and the ones we were probably fortunate to miss.
I write about what we show.
And, above all, what we try to hide.
The phone does not light up again.
For a moment, I feel something that might be sadness.
Or relief.
At a certain age, you learn that these, too, can produce exactly the same expression.
Outside, it begins to rain again.
Upstairs in the house with the blue door, the light remains on.